


Triumphs of Modesty

by twatsworthy



Category: Triumphs of Modesty
Genre: B), Canon Era, Immortality, M/M, ofapd
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-15
Updated: 2014-06-15
Packaged: 2018-02-04 18:23:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1788763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twatsworthy/pseuds/twatsworthy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>canon-era setting with immortal grantaire i really don't know what else to tell you</p>
            </blockquote>





	Triumphs of Modesty

In the year 1821, one would be foolish to consider oneself a good and proper member of the Parisian bourgeoisie if one was ignorant in their knowledge of the Musain.

It would serve our purpose best to imagine Paris’ bustling metropolis as a great corporeal system of nerves, snaking together like vines and intertwining in a way at once sporadic and formulaic, infantile and artful. The thin, winding veins of streets and the great spreads of buildings like splashes of ink on a page came together to clothe the svelte and sagacious city as if to form a thin shroud concealing the acrid and rancid stench of poverty that howled in the night with its formidable and anguished eyes. Poverty, the tribulation of a hundred great men and the hindrance of a billion – beneath gentle Paris’ wafting veil, it lurked, its filthy heartbeat perhaps audible if one were so inclined to hear it. If social circles were the blood of Paris, poverty represented its disease – a disease not incurable, and yet so festered and untreated that it had mutated into something horrific, a great howling beast impossible to ignore and yet at the same time impossible to cure. Poverty was the filth in the air that lurked behind closed doors, infecting lung after lung and eating through from the inside until it had devoured Paris, leaving nothing in its wake but the smouldering remains of a city borne upon the backs of its people as it shattered spines and souls on its ascension to greatness.

And yet such things were of no concern to this upper race of men; for, they cried uproariously, why busy themselves with the petty inner workings that turned the cogs of the mighty machine? Why not instead think of the radiant future, the utopian dawn that would come when someone great – a great man, one far better and more able than they themselves, no doubt – came along to bear the flag and lead those desperate souls to salvation? All that remained to be done was wait until such a man came along, which, surely, would be any day now.

Until then, they could busy themselves with more pressing matters such as the mysterious case of the Musain.

The nucleus of Paris was formed of men such as these, and they in themselves created a perfectly respectable society of psychological denial and ignorance. The ignorance of the peasant and the ignorance of the bourgeois lie close together with but one fundamental difference separating them by deadly degrees; the former is to be pitied, the latter, scorned.

The Musain lay in the heart of this perfectly respectable society; upon the first dimension, it was a café neither like nor unlike any other café in Paris. It was of about middle size, had been around for a time indeterminate and yet estimated to have been at least a few decades; it served substandard wine and beer, and yet its cheeses were splendid and its profiteroles more so; it was frequented by a diverse crowd ranging from the young student to the retired gendarme to the mother of four, and yet nobody with an income below a certain level of respectability dared step foot in there; it had not a single trait that caused it to be discerned from any other café in the great nucleus, and this was what made it such an object of attraction to gossipers and scholars alike.

A young man of around nineteen living less than a block away from the elusive café could be heard on a sprightly summer morning eagerly assuring his friend that he had seen the phantom inhabitant of the Musain, a pale spectre with hollow eyes who could walk through walls and threw flaming swords at anyone who crossed him. The elderly wife of a mild-mannered gardener at the same time recounted to her husband the events of the night before, in which she had been passing the Musain when she heard a blood-curdling shriek partially muffled by an incessant rattling “of bones or of chains, only the good Lord knows, but Heavens above, that sound was far from earthly!”. On the other hand, a respected lawyer known for his intimate friendship that bordered on misconduct with a waitress in the café told all who listened about how it was home to a lonely recluse who had lived perhaps seven decades now, holed up in the dark recesses of the wine cupboard drinking himself into seclusion and bemoaning the tragic and untimely death of his beloved, half a century ago. “Don’t go near that café at night,” he warned, “for all that can be heard is his wretched sobbing. It’s enough to wake the whole of Paris up.” As it happened, he himself had been seen slipping into the Musain at night with his companionable waitress, a questionable practice that brought the validity of his claim into question.

Who was correct? This was the matter of pressing urgency that titillated the tongues of each and every member of this particular social circle; a matter all the more burdensome for the way nobody would be the one to seek the answer and so ruin the mystery and the gossip that surrounded it. Every day, frustrated cries went up in the homes of these Parisians, and each in turn stubbornly refused to be the one to give up the chase.  A concentrated game of cat-and-mouse was played in circles such as these, whilst a greater and far more deadly one took place under the leafy skin and out of the corners of their eyes. Such psychological denial is an impressive, though not admirable, feat.

It so happened that on a gloomy and unremarkable day in March, a particular family of great social prestige and importance was wandering somewhat aimlessly through Paris’ veins. They were ignorant to all that was going on around them and lost in aloof conversation and quoted witticisms of the great minds of the era, discussing political reform and economic crises and other such intellectual subjects. Of them, there were three.

The father could perhaps be best characterised as a beanpole; tall and slender, with a freakishly large head and a protruding nose as his most prominent features. His lips were thin and his eyes were small, overshadowed by the mountainous region of his nose so closely succeeded by a great, drooping moustache. His hairline was receding, a detail which he took particular care to conceal under a top hat which in itself contained more personality than its entire wearer. His speech was brisk and astute, yet lacking all the necessary originality needed to make it genuine. Towards his family, he was authoritative and condescending; to all others, he was distant and impenetrable for the simple reason that there was no layer beneath the surface for one to penetrate. He altogether made for an unremarkable silhouette lost to the great grains of Parisian time and filtered out with little remorse from his maker.

His wife, on the other hand, was short and rounded, with an animated face and expressive hands that tended to move in tandem with her bold speech. She was brilliantly blonde and scarcely looked over thirty – her most profoundly concealed secret was that she was, in fact, thirty-six. Towards her husband she was scarcely a degree from indifferent; towards her son, she was amiable, pleasant, and yet no writer would dare suggest that she went as far as being loving. Her intellectual quotient was made up of a handful of books paraphrased to her by her brothers, and her vocabulary was largely constructed from eavesdropping in on conversations as a hobby. She was not without the desire and capability to become educated; a ‘woman of the world’, as it is more fashionably phrased; she had merely been without means for the greatest portion of her life, and now, fear that she had not the time anymore overtook her desire to mediate herself. She instead ensured that her child grew up with the opportunities that she herself had been deprived of, and was strident in her way of refining his education. But at what cost?

The extravagant wiles of the mother had led to her son being bequeathed the name Enjolras. Scarcely eleven years old, yet with such airs and graces as to cause him to appear at least fourteen, he had inherited his mother’s blonde hair and his father’s aloofness. He looked at the world with eyes that could perhaps have been inquisitive if not distilled and disillusioned by the great frontier of dull, strenuous learning that his mother forced upon him, and moved as though a single step out of an invisible line would create a tragedy. And yet, he was not cruel. Above all, he held a capacity of love far more piquant than should ever be present in a child; an overwhelming love that consumed him through tedious days and restless nights. Enjolras, eleven years old, may as well have been grown for all the passion and the love he felt within him – having nowhere to direct this love, adoring not his indiscernible father or his flighty mother, he instead held it within until he found a cause worthy of his passion and adoration. What could have been his greatest weapon become now a weighty burden.

It was this abstract curiosity of a mismatched family that now entered the Musain.


End file.
